“Addictively fun,” “easy,” “safe,” and “crucial” are probably not the first words people think of when food preservation is mentioned, but it can be all of those things. As a locavore living in a cold-winter region, my pantry of preserved foods brings variety to my winter diet and reduces my food costs. It also helps me stick to my commitment to eating local, organic foods.

The Variety Factor and Keeping it Local

I wouldn’t starve if I didn’t freeze, can, dry or ferment some of summer’s harvest. I live in New York City and we’ve got farmers’ markets year-round, as well as some winter community supported agriculture (CSA) shares. But my winter diet would be boring without preserved foods. What’s available in mid-winter is mostly limited to stored crops—root vegetables, cabbages, apples, and winter squash. Just how many bowls of potato and cabbage soup can a gal eat? I’d probably end up grabbing a can of organic tomatoes (shipped from California) off the supermarket shelf in desperation.

Instead I’ve got a stash of food from local farms that I preserved when the ingredients were at their freshest and most nutritious. For example last night, as a February blizzard kicked in, I ate ratatouille on freekah grain. The freekah was from Cayuga Pure Organics, one of my favorite farms at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. The ratatouille was made with eggplant, tomatoes and summer squash that were in my CSA share last August.

The Cost Factor

It is a wonderful fact about local ingredients that when they are at their best they are also the least expensive. A pint of June strawberries costs less and tastes better than it does in September, even from the farmers’ markets. When I make a strawberry smoothie for breakfast in January with the June strawberries I have in the freezer, its flavor blows away any out-of-season fruit, and saves me money, too.

The Convenience Factor

Being a locavore doesn’t exempt me from long work hours, or my cell phone’s alarm clock waking me up earlier than I’d like. It does mean that I don’t eat non-local packaged foods (no high protein breakfast bar to grab). Nor do I give myself the option of dashing into the corner deli because I didn’t have time to pack a lunch (with rare exceptions—I’m not perfect).

• Breakfast Grab: a scoop of homemade yogurt and a scoop of homemade pear preserves dumped into a portable container and eaten on the train.
• Lunch Grab: a jar of dilly beans and a piece of local cheese.
• Snack grab: dried apples.
• Too Tired to Think Dinner Grab: beet salad out of a jar and soup out of the freezer.

All these foods are possible because months ago, some afternoon when I could grab the time, I made the pear preserves, canned the dilly beans and beets, froze the soup, and dried the apples. The time I spent then gives me the option not to spend time on food preparation later.

The Safety Factor

When I teach food preservation, I can see the fear in my students’ eyes at the beginning. Botulism is what they’re thinking.

Actually, safe food preservation isn’t that hard and you don’t have to take any risks—so long as you follow the rules.

With dried foods, the only rule is that the food be dry enough not to mold. The rules for canning are that non-acidic fruits and vegetables have to be pressure canned, (which requires special equipment), or have acidic ingredients such as sugar, honey, or vinegar added (yeah, sugar counts as acidic on the pH scale), or be fermented so that they achieve that safe, extreme pH. You can find answers to which fruits and vegetables are acidic enough to preserve without pressure canning, and other questions at The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Two Simple Food Preservation Recipes that Require No Special Equipment

Here are two delicious, safe, easy ways to preserve food that don’t require special canning equipment. They are also useful for dealing with winter storage fruit such as apples and pears that may be past their crunchy or juicy prime.

Oven-Dried Fruits and Vegetables

If you’ve got a dehydrator, by all means use it—it’s more energy efficient than the method below.

• Fruits or vegetables cut into pieces approximately ¼-inch thick, any length or width okay (scoop out seeds if tomatoes)*

1. Preheat oven to 175°F.
2. Spread fruits and vegetables out on baking sheet in a single layer with a little space between each piece. Bake for 1-2 hours, turning the pieces over at least once. They should be somewhere between leathery and crispy. If still moist, continue baking for another 1-2 hours until done (for safe food preservation, if you’re not sure when they’re done, err on the side of crispy-but-not-burnt).
3. To use dehydrated vegetables, pour boiling water over and let soak for 15 minutes before adding to soups and other dishes (use the soaking water for soup stock). Dehydrated fruit can be munched for a snack as is, or rehydrated and used to make pies, crumbles, etc.

Your dehydrated produce will not taste like its fresh equivalent any more than raisins taste like grapes. The flavor will be more concentrated and sweeter. Oven-dried tomatoes taste like sundried tomatoes—fabulous, but an entirely different ingredient than fresh tomatoes.

Fermented Fruit Chutney

My riff on a Sally Fallon recipe. If you don’t already have her book Nourishing Traditions, I highly recommend it. Also check out Sandor Ellix Katz’s Wild Fermentation.

Makes approximately 1 quart

• 3 cups fresh fruit, peeled, cored, and finely chopped
• 1/2 cup filtered water (the chlorine in straight tap water can halt the fermentation process)
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 tablespoons whey* (if you’ve got yogurt in the house, you can make whey, see note below)
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• 1/2 cup raisins (I used some that I got at a farmers’ market when I was in California, but other dried fruit would work, too)
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon ground spicebush berries (or black pepper)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1. Combine the water, vinegar, honey and whey. Mix with the other ingredients and pack firmly into a quart-size glass jar, leaving at least an inch of head space. The liquid should come up to the top of the fruit. If it doesn’t, add a little filtered water.
2. Cover and leave at room temperature for 2 days. Refrigerate and leave for another week before eating. Will keep in the refrigerator for 2 months. Serve with rice, meat, cheese, whatever suits your fancy. I’ve been putting dollops of it on top of butternut squash soup, and that’s a heavenly combination.

*Whey

If you drain yogurt through cloth or paper filters over a bowl, the liquid that separates out is whey. Drained yogurt is thicker than regular, and delicious. If you let it drain in the refrigerator for 24 hours you have something with the exact consistency of cream cheese, which is delicious on toast topped with some of that chutney you used the whey to make.